MPEG-4 based stereoscopic video sequences encoder

In this paper, we propose an object-based MPEG-4 compatible stereoscopic video sequence encoder. We aim at efficient stereoscopic video compression for videoconferencing and 3D telepresence systems. The stereoscopic video sequence includes one main view and one auxiliary view. The main view is encoded using an MPEG-4 encoder and the auxiliary view is encoded by joint motion and disparity compensation. After the input sequences are balanced to compensate for lighting conditions and camera differences, the joint disparity and motion regularization is performed on a VOP basis. The output of the encoder contains two bitstreams, a main bitstream, which can be decoded by a standard MPEG-4 decoder, and an auxiliary bitstream. Simulation results show that the joint estimation and regularization of disparity and motion fields provide more accurate vector fields and efficient compression for the auxiliary stream. The proposed system achieves high image quality at lower bitrate than existing stereoscopic video encoders.